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- The "Libation Formula", which the author used as the base for his translations, is the most studied piece of writing in Linear A, because it's the only recurring phrase (with grammatical variation) that we have. The corpus is extremely fragmentary, with just a handful of instances of longer text (and even then, the texts are the length of an average sentence in English). The majority of documents available to us are lists (of inventory, personnel, offerings or something of this sort). The longer texts make use of punctuation marks, likely put in between words. This gives us a non-trivial vocabulary, which still does not match that of any known language.
- With such fragmentary remaining material, we cannot be sure that a) all the texts we call "Linear A" are written in the same language, and b) the recognizable words are not abbreviations, for example.
- The author made an assumption that Linear A symbols which have counterparts in Linear B should have the same phonetic values. This gives us an already known glyph that represented "NA". "Duplicate" glyphs are only found in the P-series, and are assumed to represent syllables which were distinguished by the Linear A language, but not by Greek - such as aspirated/unaspirated P. There is a glyph that stands for "NWA" in Linear B, but instances of it have been found in Linear A as well.
- There are countless words with no known etymology in Ancient Greek, assumed to originate from a substrate language or languages spoken in the area at the time Greeks migrated to their present-day homeland. The language of Linear A would be a likely candidate for such substrate. If Linear A were a Semitic language, then we should already be able to establish Semitic etymologies for those words as they were in Greek. Of course it could also be the case that these words came from an another language which did not adopt writing or its writing did not survive to our times.
I've also reached out to Dr. Ester Salgarella, so I'm familiar with attempts to apply computational analysis to the corpus, and where previous efforts erred.
That's exactly the kind of thing I'd hope Claude would be used for in these kinds of projects - building tools, not black-box "solving" the problem.
If you have a 4k screen, you can fit all remaining Linear A text on your screen at once, in 14pt high font.
Some of the lists end with "ku-ro" and a number that's the sum of all the previous numbers, oddly frequently off by one.
Obviously one symbol can mean literally anything, but you could also have very long strings of symbols with many different meanings.
>> reviewed by linguistics experts at Rutgers and Cambridge.
Here in Argentina, near 2005, we had like 5 guys that claimed to have 5 independent solutions of the Goldbach Conjeture. Each one got a PhD student that volunteer to read it, discussed the obvious problems with the author, tried to help to solve them and after a few months of back and forth they concluded that none of the solutions were correct or has an interesting insight. Nobody was surprised about the that, but some wanted to give them a try.
Until there is a official report by Rutgers or Cambridge, it doesn't mean too much.
>> He's translated over 300 words
Where is the table of translations?
* Ventris' publication, but given Kober's contribution to the work they should really share equal credit. I like to think Kober would have got there on her own if she had access to the larger corpus that Ventris had (the Pylos tablets) and a comparable amount of free time and money available.
Could you rephrase this or explain it more thoroughly? I don’t follow. What does it mean to categorize a written form by systems built with Claude?
The original prompts aren't provided, nor is the original context; even then, you can't really treat a stochastic system like an LLM as a major component in reproducibility.
Cynical read would be you’re stealing his thunder a bit by prematurely announcing this before it’s fully confirmed
One of the things I find weird with AI is how the dismissals of work that involve AI splits into two camps: like yours, saying the AI did the work while the human played no role and deserves no credit; and those saying the AI rips off its training data while the human using it played no role and deserves no credit.
To be clear, this is an attempt at a decipherment. This is not proven, and we shouldn't consider Linear A to be "solved" until experts in the field have reviewed the work. In fact, it probably shouldn't be considered "proof" unless some more Linear A writings are uncovered and these are congruent with the method proposed. All that can be said for certain at this point is that this is an interesting conjecture.
But this is a story worth following. This could be the real deal. More research and validation should follow and we should have a better idea in the next few weeks or months whether Linear A has really been solved. At the very least, this is an interesting attempt, and optimistically, it could yield real insight into Minoan culture. Kudos.
Honestly curious how many years before it can be one shotted in a coding harness with Fable.next by someone who’s not a linguistics expert.
Develop, test, and rank hypotheses about the phonetic values, morphology, grammar, and possible language family of Linear A using the full available corpus. Do not assume any decipherment is correct. Treat all candidate readings as hypotheses to be scored…”
I know I'm simplifying a lot, but all this deciphering isn't it just some kind of pattern matching?
however, nawaya or what ever examples around it are not part of the Hebrew language.
Claiming that claude did all the work is patently ridiculous. Claude is a tool, like any other. The corpus of linear A is ~7500 characters across ~1500 inscriptions and claude, no matter how smart, doesn't just solve that on its own.
What a shame.
It's a common misconception that is what happened with Ancient Egyptian with the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone was just one of the big pieces of the puzzle. The decoding came when people realized that Coptic (a language written alphabetically and still in use in the Coptic Church today) is actually descended from Ancient Egyptian; as Spanish is to Latin, Coptic is to Ancient Egyptian.
Similarly the attempts to decode classical Maya were all dead ends. Until Yuri Knorozov realized that it encoded the ancestor of the Maya languages which are still spoken to this day. (Knorozov's Wikipedia article is worth checking out just for his photo with his cat. [0] IMHO.)
I have written before about the La Mojarra 1 stele in Mexico [1]. It looks a lot like Maya. [2] But it isn't Maya. Maybe the difference like between Russian and Latin writing?
No one can read it. It's undecipherable. There are some attempts to identify it with a proposed ancient language that would have been related to the modern Mixe-Zoque languages: some of the glyphs that are shared with Maya, when read phonetically, start sounding like a Mixe-Zoque language. But no one has proposed a confident decipherment. There probably isn't enough text. La Mojarra 1 is the only long example of the Isthmian script.
Deciphering Akkadian was very difficult, at first. The process started with Persian; old Persian was written in a simplified adapted form of the Mesopotamian cuneiform (wedges on clay). It was a kind of alphabet. And Old Persian was already understood. And there was a bilingual text on a monument carved by Darius I. But even then -- decoding relies so heavily on the fact that Akkadian is a Semitic language distantly related to Hebrew, more distantly, also Ancient Egyptian. So again, we sort of knew what we were looking for.
That is all to say: even if the Voynich manuscript (for example) contains real text in an otherwise completely lost language, I'm not sure it is possible even theoretically to translate it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Knorozov
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Mojarra_Stela_1
[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_Mojarra_Stela_1_S...